Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
Most of police problems come from underfunding. Beat cops run from call to call for 8-12 hours a shift barely getting anything done; detectives are overwhelmed with insane numbers of shootings, rapes and murders; vehicles are old and beat up and barely working; the number of cops on the streets is declining, so cops get fewer days off and all vacation time is regularly cancelled.